NY Times Article

Well it's not a book review, but I thought this article in the NY Times was very interesting.

Also, because it made me remember when I was first dating Adolfo and saw that he had "The Fountainhead" on his bookshelf. When I asked him about it, he responded that it had been a gift and he never read it. Phew!

The Abstinence Teacher

I just read this book by Tom Parrotta. It was a different kind of book for me as there was no mystery. It was a book about people and the troubles some of them face. One main character was a health teacher (middle school) who responded to a student comment about oral sex "some people enjoy it." The fallout from that was kind of maddening. The other main character is a born again Christian who had been a doper in college. The politics and sociology of these two matching up was well done.

Funny Fiction List Request

Ok, I looked online, but it is not listed. It's a 3 page pamphlet (front and back!) so I'm not likely to type them all in. But my library does have an EXCELLENT "find a good book" webpage. Check it out if you're stuck for something good to read.

Funny Fiction part II

The Stately Home Murder. Could have been funny but not enough character development. Not a bad mystery though.

Emma by Jane Austen. Hilarious of course! I read this one already awhile back, but I may be reading it again just fun for. I was thinking of re-reading all the Austens this summer.

Royal Flash, From the Flashman Papers

Take a peek at this book. I found it on a "Funny Fiction" List from my library. It was indeed funny. I am not sure about an excerpt, since the main character is a little... well, himself and not always appropriate. In fact rarely appropriate, but very funny. He is a MAJOR coward who has been decorated for bravery in war (I am planning on reading the first book to find out how that happened) and he looks at every situation in a way that provides the best outcome for HIM. Fortunately the situations are ridiculous. Funny adventure book.

Also read off the funny books list:

Faith Fox (not funny)

Mapp and Lucia (very funny! Hurrah it's also a series!)

Percy Jackson

Madeline brought this home from school. I love to read a good kid book and picked it right up. We have both read through book three now, "The Titan's Curse" and are having a great time. These remind me of Artemis Fowl, by E. Colfer and Harry Potter. We have already pre-ordered the next one coming out in May.
Percy Jackson is a middle school boy who finds out his dad is Poseidon. It turns out this is why he has such bad ADHD, :-). He goes off to a camp for kids who have both a mortal and an Olympian god as parents. He is pursued by monsters and greek gods and has to drag up a good deal of knowledge about the Greek gods to figure things out.
Here is what Booklist had to say:
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Just after finding Bianca and Nico, two newly discovered half-bloods, Percy, Grover, Annabeth, and Thalia end up trapped between a helicopter and a manticore. Artemis and her Hunters save the day, but Annabeth disappears over a cliff; then Artemis rushes off to hunt a dangerous monster. Back at Camp Half-Blood, the Oracle foretells that Artemis must be rescued and makes a prediction that bodes ill for one of their number—but which one? Percy, who is supposed to remain behind while others pursue the quest, follows in search of the missing Annabeth. Their adventures range widely across the U.S., taking them to locales that include Washington, D.C., and the deserts of the Southwest and pitting them against the usual assortment of colorful adversaries. The Percy Jackson & the Olympians series is built around a terrific idea—that the half-mortal offspring of Greek gods live among us, playing out struggles of mythic scale—and Riordan takes it from strength to strength with this exciting installment, adding even more depth to the characters and story arc while retaining its predecessors' nonstop laughs and action. Tixier Herald, Diana
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

New Grisham Book

I eagerly awaited the latest Grisham book and now it is here, and I have read it. Unfortunately, it is not my favorite John Grisham. I liked "Playing For Pizza" better I think.
For me the problem with this book is that he is busy making important political statements about our judicial system and not just spinning a good legal thriller. I imagine many people will enjoy this book, however I read for fun and it was just too real. "The Testament" still remains my all time favorite of his books. I refuse to read his nonfiction works (The Innocent Man and A Time to Kill) but have read and enjoyed all of his other books. If you like legal thrillers and don't mind real stuff you'll probably like this book. If you like to read mindlessly like me for pure pleasure, then maybe not.

Political Thrillers

I used to like Tom Clancy but lost interest as his books "dried" up. Recently a colleague told me he liked Vince Flynn so on a lark I tried him. I'm hooked. Kind of like when I first read a Kathy Reichs. He does the thriller/suspense part quite well. For a political/spy type thriller, try him, you'll like him.
I've just read about Barry Eisler who apparently writes the same type and his protagonist is half American half Japanese. I'll let you know how that goes when I get one read.

Animal Vegetable Miracle

I LOVE Barbara Kingsolver. When Della introduced me to her I immediately read everything she ever wrote (sadly, not nearly as many books as I had hoped). Well, now she has a new one that J gave me for Christmas. I just started reading it 5 minutes ago and I am only to page 11, but it is FANTASTIC. So I thought I would post right away so that you would all go read it immediately and wouldn't have to suffer through one more minute of not reading this book. But you are going to have to go get your own copy, because there is no way you are going to be able to pry it out of my hands. Jeremy has already been circling suspiciously. I guess there is a possibility that once I read more than 10 pages that my ardor will cool, but I doubt it. I will let you know. Anyway, here is a tasty tidbit for you:

(Upon moving from Tuscon, AZ to Virginia--thoughts on agriculture in the US)
"We also have convinced ourselves it (farming) wasn't too important. Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-th-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

If that is true, why isn't it good enough for someone else to know multiplication and the contents of the Bill of Rights? Is the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, less relevant to our lives than the history of the 13 colonies? Couldn't one make a case for the relevance of a subject that informs choices we make daily--as in, What's for dinner? Isn't ignorance of our food sources causing problems as diverse as overdependence on petroleum, and an epidemic of diet-related diseases?

If this book is not exactly an argument for reinstating food-production classes in schools (and it might be), it does contain a lot of what you might learn there. From our family's gas-station beginnings we have traveled far enough to discover ways of taking charge of one's food, and even knowing where it has been. This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them.

(skipping forward a little)

Absence of that knowledge (farming) has rendered us a nation of wary label readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat. We call our food animals by different names after they're dead, presumably sparing ourselves any vision of the beefs and the porks running around on actual hooves. Our words for unhealthy contamination--"soiled" or "dirty"--suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea o eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew."

One more opinion

Here is Time's thoughts on the matter,one's non-fiction and the second is fiction:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1691768,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1691840,00.html